Research project Exploring Extended Reality for Aphantasics
If you close your eyes, can you imagine a red apple? Around four percent of the world’s population cannot. The inability to voluntarily create mental images is called aphantasia. In this project, we explore how immersive digital media may offer alternative forms of imagination and visual mental imagery.
The project aims to explore how immersive technologies may support visual imagery for aphantasics in daily-life activities like navigation or drawing.
This project aims to collect empirical material and data for exploratory design and research work on how immersive technologies in extended reality (XR), such as augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), can support people with aphantasia.
Aphantasia is a cognitive variation that involves the absence of, or severely reduced ability to create, visual mental images. This affects how individuals imagine environments, memories and future scenarios, and how they engage in for example meditation, creative creation or planning. Approximately four percent of the population is estimated to have aphantasia, but the condition is still relatively unexplored and its consequences for everyday life and cognitive strategies are insufficiently understood.
The project is based on the assumption that people with aphantasia develop alternative cognitive strategies to compensate for the lack of visual mental images. By using XR technologies as external, immersive visualization tools, we investigate how such strategies can be understood, supported and further developed to enable rich visual experiences that can enhance internal imagery.
The project will focus on scientifically investigating how people with aphantasia experience and use visual representations in cognitive tasks. We are also interested in how these experiences can be supported through immersive technologies in extended reality (XR), such as augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR). Instead of diagnostic purposes, the project focuses on cognitive variation and on developing new knowledge about how people with limited or non-existent mental imagery ability handle tasks that traditionally require visual mental representation.
The project aims to deepen the scientific understanding of the relationship between internal mental visualization and external visual representations, and how XR can function as a cognitive support or reinforcing tool for alternative strategies. Special emphasis is placed on understanding how individuals with aphantasia use non-visual strategies – for example verbal, spatial or analytical representations – and how these strategies can be supplemented or changed through interaction with immersive visual environments.
To achieve this, the project develops and empirically investigates XR-based research prototypes and experimental tasks that enable systematic comparisons between participants with varying degrees of mental imagery ability. By varying the degree of immersive visualization and interactivity in the XR environments, the project aims to identify how different forms of external visualization affect cognitive performance, experience, and strategy choice, and how these effects differ between people with and without aphantasia.
At the same time, the project addresses a clear knowledge gap about how such technologies interact with individual differences in mental visualization ability. By approaching aphantasia from a data science and interaction design perspective, the project contributes new theoretical and empirical insights to research on cognitive inclusion.